Mothers & Daughters

Hmm.

Palak? Mushroom? She had run out of tomatoes, anyway, and onions as well. As she surveyed the aisle of vegetables and frozen foods, filled with all the things one might need for a decent meal, Jaya felt a wave of indecision, all too familiar, sweep over her.

The faint vibration alerted her. Mom is right, I need a bag with enough pockets, she thought, as she scrambled in her bag for the elusive source of the buzzing. It was annoying how often Mom was right. When she finally found it, the blinking light indicated that she had missed the call.

Mom.

Malathi called everyday, a daily check to hear the voice of her only daughter in a faraway land. Cradling the phone between her ear and neck (must invest in a headset!), Jaya dialed her parents’ number. Her mother picked up on the first ring.

‘Where are you?’, she said, by way of greeting, ‘Why didn’t you pick up the phone?’.

No matter what time of day it was, if Jaya didn’t answer the call, her mother was apt to imagine the mangled remains of her child under the subway, or a car, or, perhaps, in a supermarket aisle.

‘I’m grocery shopping, ma’, she said, ‘by the time I reached the phone, you had hung up’.

‘I told you to buy a bag with enough compartments’, said her mother. ‘Aren’t there any vegetables at home? It’s quite late isn’t it? It’s already 7.30 there, no?’

‘Relax ma, don’t panic. 7.30 isn’t all that late. And yes, I didn’t shop over the weekend, so I have to do this now.’ As ever, her mother reminded Jaya that she needed to plan her life better. Plan. Plan to buy a headset, a house, a bag with pockets. Plan dinner. Right, that was the focus now. Would the mushroom & tomato take too long? She was hungry, and by the time she got home, it would be a quarter past eight.

Meanwhile, her mother was talking about her niece. Apparently, Jaya’s cousin Ayesha was getting engaged. Ayesha was 24, a good 5 years younger than Jaya.

‘That’s lovely,’ said Jaya, still debating the merits of mushroom & tomato over daal-palak and potato subji. ‘The mushroom will be faster, but I think I feel more like daal…or do I feel like mushroom? Is there any baby corn at home? That should be easy enough…

‘Is that all you have to say?!’ demanded her mother.

‘What should I say, ma? It’s nice that she’s engaged. Nice for her, that is, if she likes the guy. Who is he?’

‘He’s working in California. I don’t know what he does…Shanthi said something..I can’t remember, but very good family, and they are well-to-do, and he has two sisters..’

As her mother went on, Jaya quickly stuffed some tomatoes, picked up a packet of mushroom. Screwing her nose up at them, she almost changed her mind, but then decided to go for it. She didn’t want daal-paalak tonight.

‘Of course, she asked about you…’ Here, her mother’s voice took on that vaguely injured, self-pitying tone that Jaya had come to know so well, whenever the subject was her shockingly single status.

‘I hope you told her that I’m doing very well, ma..did you tell her about the promotion?’ Jaya often used humour to keep the annoyance that she felt out of her voice. She knew it wasn’t her mother’s fault.

In Malathi’s world, girls grew up well behaved, learning essential life skills such as cooking, house keeping, in addition to keeping up with times and being ‘modern’ in dress and education. Even if they worked for a living, they eventually ‘settled’ (by the time they were 25) with a nice boy and had at least one child. Single at 29, Jaya had broken a cardinal rule, of the long list of rules of Familial Duty. By this one act of defiance, she had distanced herself from her mother, sometimes (she felt), permanently. Malathi wondered, sometimes aloud, much to Jaya’s exasperation, where she had gone wrong.

Malathi went through life troubled by a gnawing sense of inadequacy. If she had taken time to think about it, she might have traced its roots back to the slightly disappointed expression that her husband of a day had worn when she served him their first meal as husband and wife. Malathi had never cooked much- her elder sisters had managed the kitchen, and Malathi had been content to let them. She preferred spending her time hiding in the loft, reading the latest stories in the periodicals that were begged and borrowed from friends and neighbours.

As he looked at the slightly burnt bhindi, the rice a trifle overcooked, and the moru curry with a bit more onion than he liked, Srinivas had realized that he might have to adjust his idea of what life would be like. Although he didn’t realize it, there crept in, at that moment, a sense of ill-usage on his part, and a thorn of anxiety on hers, that would set the tone for their life together.

Malathi tried. She told herself that she must learn to like the kitchen, must learn to cook all the dishes that he liked; and then, later, when two children joined them at the table, all the dishes that they liked.

She cooked, and cleaned, kept the house neat, in addition to her daily work as an accountant at the Railways office, but it was never quite good enough. Especially, in the kitchen.

Planning the next meal became her obsession. She worried over it constantly. When her colleagues were talking about jewelry and their children’s homework, she found herself wondering if she had remembered to put the chhole out to soak, and whether the beans would be too spicy. She would leap at recipes from colleagues, buy recipe books by the dozen and sweat for hours in the kitchen, especially on weekends. The results were never satisfactory, at least to her. She envied other women the easy assurance with which they talked of hosting family dinners, of the very tasty paneer that their husbands had loved, of the new home-made sweets that Chintu’s friends had gobbled up. The children’s ‘tiffin’ was a particular source of anxiety. She would wake up every day at 5 to get it ready, and it was true, that they came back with their boxes empty, but one day, Krishna, 8, artless, had asked ‘Why don’t you make daal like the other moms do? Yours tastes different’ and Malathi had felt the red hot flush of embarrassment cover her face. She had let down the children.

As the children grew into high school and later college, they no longer wanted to carry home food, preferring to eat at the local canteen. It was much cooler. Also, said Jaya, you don’t have to bother so much anymore. “Nonsense,’, Malathi had replied, ‘ It’s not a trouble to make food for my children’. ‘Oh Mom!’ Jaya had exclaimed (by then it was ‘mom’, not ‘Amma’), ‘You know you’d be glad not to struggle every morning to figure out what to make for our lunch. Think about it, an extra half hour of sleep!’ And she gave her mother a hug. Strangely, her daughter’s perceptiveness, did not comfort Malathi. But she did not press the argument, having learnt by then that there was little point in arguing with Jaya, once she had made up her mind. Jaya always won an argument. Far too clever with words, Malathi thought. People will say she is headstrong. Malathi worried already about Jaya acquiring a ‘reputation’. She told herself that Jaya was only 18, and would grow out of it.

She had tried her best with Jaya. She had tried to get her, especially, to cook. But no amount of lecturing, cajoling or threatening would induce Jaya to step into the kitchen.

Srinivas, of course, blamed Malathi. ‘Daughters learn from their mothers’, he said one day, after a dinner table argument about Malathi’s refusal to help her mother in the kitchen. ‘Actually, dad, considering you can’t even make a cup of tea, wouldn’t you say I’d learnt from you?’ said Jaya, flashing him a smile. Krishna chortled. Srinivas had never yet managed to discipline his daughter, leaving such necessary business to his wife. When he found that Jaya was (to his mind), inexplicably ‘modern’, he blamed Malathi for it. ‘Forget it, mom’, Krishna interjected, ‘You’re never going to get her into the kitchen. Just as well. Imagine if she cooks like she does Physics.’ Jaya hit him on the shoulder.

Strangely enough, Jaya had, eventually, entered the kitchen. Almost a year after taking up her first job in Mumbai and a flat where she stayed alone (‘All alone! Why not a PG? Is it safe?’ Her mother had worried), Jaya had found she could no longer abide restaurant food or the food cooked by a succession of domestics. She realized that she would have to do that job, like so many others, by herself, if she wanted it done well.

Surprising everybody, not the least her mother, having embarked on a culinary career, Jaya found that not only did she like cooking; she had quite a flair for it.

Thinking back, Jaya realized that the sole reason she had stayed away from the kitchen all these years, was that she had equated it with the prison of traditional roles. Seeing her mother do, every day, for 25 years, a job that she disliked, just because, as a woman, she was expected to do it, had made Jaya determined never to put herself in that position. But cooking itself was a good art, and there was a freedom in knowing that she had chosen to do it.

Srinivas, of course, thought that his daughter had seen the Light.

‘So what else did you do today?’ Jaya asked.

‘Oh, we had to attend a dinner for the new manager and his wife’. Srinivas was retiring and brought in a successor from another city.

‘How was it?’, asked Jaya, knowing that Malathi, shy even after all these years, found social occasions quite nerve-wracking.

‘It was ok…Mrs. Hegde..she’s very fashionable..short hair..’ Jaya smiled to herself. For her mother short hair was still the symbol of emancipation and modernity. ‘She was wearing a simple salwar kameez…I felt overdressed in my silk…’ Malathi hesitated a second.

‘You know, she said she never cooks. They have always had maids to do the cooking because she doesn’t like doing it..’Malathi’s voice was still slightly tinged with the disbelief she had felt on hearing Vasundhara Hegde say something so unexpected. ‘It’s the first time I’m hearing a woman say that…I mean, a woman from my age group..say that..and in public…’ her voice trailed off.

Jaya felt an intense love for her mother at that moment.

But what she said was, ‘Ma, gotta go, just reached the billing counter’.

She had not. Instead, she went back, picked up some paalak and headed home. The daal-palak tasted fabulous, just like ma’s.